


As a Known Enemy

by aeli_kindara



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-04 01:18:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12760161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: He has no idea what makes him do it. It just seems that today, of all days, in Kentucky, of all places, to collide with Harry Potter at a goddamned gas station is an occasion to be memorialized.In which Snape and Harry take an angsty road trip across the U.S., with a side of vigilante justice.(Very slight Justified crossover, no prior knowledge necessary.)





	As a Known Enemy

Severus blows up the church on a Tuesday.

He feels a pang of regret about it. He sits on the tailgate of Boyd’s sister’s old station wagon and smokes a cigarette as he watches it burn, and wonders when exactly thirty-foot conflagrations stopped raising his pulse. The church was solidly built, if a little worse for its years, and it’s been his home for the last few months — his world. He knows the hole in the baseboard where the mice get in, and the spot on the ceiling where at 3pm each day the shadows make a fleeting, broken-nosed profile, something like Albus’s face. He knows the exact pattern of bleach spots on the swastika flag draped behind the pulpit, scars of Dewey Crowe’s ill-fated attempt at doing the laundry himself. He can picture every inch of the place.

Mostly, he pictures Boyd. Gesticulating at the pulpit, striding down the aisle with his arms raised like he thinks he’s a fucking saviour of something, crouched earnest between the pews with his hand on Severus’s knee and his hollow eyes alight. Boyd fills every corner of every room he enters, immediately and indelibly. In the back right pew, he broods over a letter from his father, postmarked from the state pen. In the sanctuary, he inspects an ill gotten rocket launcher, aims it grinning toward the far door. Dangling from a high window frame, he shouts down jokes as he scrubs at a quarter century’s worth of spider webs clouding the panes. He’s liquid charisma; a never-ending Felix Felicis high. He’s not what Severus expected from the leader of a semi-militarized white supremacist cult in some tiny town in Kentucky. Or maybe he’s exactly what he expected. Severus has known more than his share of madmen with a cause.

They never fucked. Severus thought about it, more than once. Could have christened a few more corners of that place before he sent it up in flames.

Not flames; flame. Get a wooden building going, and every last one of those dusty corners, those memories, those spaces big and small — they’re all one flame, for a while, one roaring, toxic inferno, and then they’re nothing at all.

The people inside are almost an afterthought.

\---

He’s out of town by eleven that morning. He takes the station wagon, mostly out of a perverse interest in whether the cops will pull him over. He doubts anyone will think to report it stolen.

He stops three hours later for gas. Walks inside to pay, in a cavernous linoleum room only half-filled by its shelves of engine oil and Doritos. Bags of animal feed line the far wall, and the girl behind the counter stares open-mouthed when she hears his accent.

“Apologies, sir,” she manages after a moment, flushing. “We don’t get a lot of tourists, ‘round here. And you look so much like a local boy, I guess I thought —”

She doesn’t say what she thought. She’s right, though: Severus has gone native, in a way he finds distasteful and thrilling in almost equal measure. The jeans and baggy button-down are a costume; add a baseball cap and a mouthful of dip, and he’d blend in so well he might not recognize himself. The lank, greasy hair that earned him jeers in his Hogwarts days fits right in around here. So does the look he knows he wears, that he’s seen some shit, and isn’t about to start talking about it.

It’s strange. An ocean and a war and a few odd decades stretch between them, but Kentucky feels more like Cokeworth than anywhere in Britain ever has.

“Anything else for you, sir?” the girl asks, still red.

“A pack of Marlboros, please,” he answers, and as she goes to get them, he turns to glance outside.

There’s a motorcycle pulled up to the pump opposite him, and the rider’s just getting off. Severus takes a moment to appreciate him as he swings one long, slim leg over the bike; his ass is tight and perfect. A lick of dark hair juts down the back of his neck from underneath his helmet. He doesn’t pause, but makes straight for the door, shoves ineffectually at it for a moment before he sees the sign that says _Pull_. A blast of hot summer air accompanies him inside, quickly overpowered by the thunderous assault of the AC, and then the guy’s pulling his helmet from his head and swiping sweaty hair out of his eyes and saying “Excuse me, do you have a —” and it’s Harry Potter.

\---

They both freeze.

For an instant, Severus is sure Potter won’t recognize him. He barely recognizes himself in a mirror, these days. But — no, that slack-jawed expression is intimately familiar from six years in Severus’s classroom. Any moment now, it will harden into hatred.

“Oh my gosh,” says the clerk. “Are you English too?”

“Uh,” Potter stammers. He’s gone beet red. “Um. Bathroom?”

“Round to the left,” says the girl, staring as he passes, head ducked low in embarrassment and neck aflame. Severus can’t entirely blame her.

“Do you guys — know each other?” she asks vaguely, turning back to him. “Oh — here’s your Marlboros.”

“No,” says Severus curtly. “And thank you.” He pays in cash, turns automatically to go, and pauses.

He has no idea what makes him do it. It just seems that today, of all days, in Kentucky, of all places, to collide with Harry Potter at a goddamned gas station is an occasion to be memorialized.

He waits outside to spare the clerk, slouched against the gas station wall. He finds himself itching for that hat, that tobacco tin, that extra cocoon of disguise.

He’s half hidden behind the door when it swings open, but Potter’s eyes find him instantly. He stops dead. Severus offers him a thin-lipped smile.

“Buy you a drink?” he asks.

\---

They meet across the road, at the dusty bar whose few windows are neatly obscured by neon signs advertising mass-market beer. The parking lot is a patchwork of asphalt and dirt, and Severus crosses it without waiting for Potter, has no interest in awkward negotiations of who should speak or whether to hold the door.

Potter joins him at the bar a minute later. His leather jacket is half unzipped over a plain white T-shirt, and his hair is sticking out in every direction. He doesn’t speak, just watches, sidelong, as Severus takes a pull of his beer.

“I’ll have the same,” Potter says to the bartender, who nods and turns to get it. A moment later, there’s the crack of a cap, and a bottle sliding across the bar.

Potter takes it in his hand, but he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t stop watching Severus.

Firmly, Severus quells the jolt of nerves in his chest. “Motorcycles,” he says, and it comes out unconcerned. “I can’t say I pegged you for the type.”

Potter gives a sheepish laugh and ducks his head, running his hand through the hair at the back of his neck and making it even worse. “I’m not, honestly,” he confesses. “I hate that thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

When Severus lifts an eyebrow at him in silent invitation, he doesn’t expect Potter to actually go on — but he does. “Sirius had one, see. A flying motorbike. I — remembered it, a little, from when Hagrid took me to the Dursleys, even when I was a kid. I used to dream about it. And then, after the war —”

He stops there, looking more sheepish than ever.

“After the war,” Severus agrees, and lifts his bottle slightly in a toast.

Potter takes his own drink, then, and stares fixedly at the shelves behind the bar. There’s a dirty mirror on the wall. Reflected, their eyes meet. “What about you?” Potter asks.

“What about me?” Severus counters. He doesn’t mean it as a challenge, and winces inwardly at the way it comes out.

Potter doesn’t react, though, doesn’t scowl and spark with indignation or fury the way he always would in Severus’s classes. “Do you live here?” he asks instead, and there’s none of the scorn Severus should expect.

“No,” says Severus. “Just passing through. I’m… between things.”

“Yeah,” says Potter. “Yeah, me too.” Suddenly, he turns to face Severus, and there’s a flyaway resolve in his eyes. “Listen,” he says. “This is weird of me, and you can say no if you want to.”

_I am perfectly aware of my own capabilities, Potter_ , Severus thinks, but he only raises an eyebrow.

“Can I ride with you for a while?” Potter plunges on. And then, uncertainly, “I mean — just until you find your next thing.”

Severus considers him. “What about your bike?”

“I don’t want it,” Potter says immediately.

He’s a fool, a damned fool, and he doesn’t know why he does it.

“All right,” Severus agrees.

\---

They leave the bike in the parking lot. Potter’s just got a small bag of stuff; whether it’s magically packed or he’s really traveling that light, Severus doesn’t ask. He drops it in the backseat and slides in the passenger side, and Severus points them west.

They stop that night at a motel under flickering street lights, and pay for a single room.

They’ve been sharing an enclosed space all day and it’s been — comfortable, honestly. The steady flow of conversation hasn’t touched on much at all: small towns and road signs; some memories, but ones that come easy. There’s no reason, after the intimacy of the station wagon, that a motel room should yawn so terrifyingly before them.

And yet, neither of them moves beyond the door, when Severus closes it behind them. The air feels too cool, after the oppressive heat outside, and the beds look too far away. After a moment, Potter turns to look at him, eyes rueful, and huffs a little laugh.

They’re standing close. Severus can feel Potter’s breath on his cheek. Neither of them moves, but the laughter fades from Potter’s eyes. Their breathing is harsh and loud in the sudden stillness.

“You smell like smoke,” Potter says.

Severus feels his lips quirk, but he can’t break eye contact. “Which kind?”

Potter doesn’t answer. He doesn’t move, either, but his eyes flick downward, suddenly, toward Severus’s mouth, and his lips are slightly parted. He smells of sweat, and potato chips, and he is the most attractive man Severus has ever seen.

A blinding rush of panic hits him without warning, and he can see Boyd’s eyes, Boyd’s grin, Boyd’s hand splayed on his knee. He’s stepped back, sharply, before he realizes it. “I — lost someone,” he says, idiotically, because they’ve all lost someone, they’ve lost the _same_ someones at that. “Today,” he adds, to clarify, and his gut twists with shame.

Potter’s still watching him. Like a storm cloud, though, the danger has passed. “I’m sorry,” he says, quiet and serious and everything Severus doesn’t deserve. He seems to mean it.

_Me too,_ Severus thinks, but he doesn’t say it, just offers Potter first shower. By the time he’s finished his own, Potter is stretched out face down on the far bed, breathing deep and even with just the hint of a snore.

Severus hasn’t needed the sleeping potion much, lately, but he still keeps a vial in his bag. He’d be seven kinds of fool not to use it tonight. He measures the tiny dose, knocks it back, and surrenders himself to oblivion.

\---

“Snape. _SNAPE!_ ”

There are hands on his shoulders, shaking him, and he hears the shouting as if from a great depth.

It seems unimportant. He lets himself recede again.

“Damnit, _Snape!_ ” There’s a sharp crack, sound and pain across the face that must be his. “Don’t you fucking die on me, if _you_ fucking die on me —”

The bed beneath him is shaking, an erratic shiver in its springs. The grip on his shoulders is hard enough to bruise, and there are knees locked tight around his hips. He opens his eyes.

The bed is shaking because Potter is shaking, furious tremors that make his whole body buckle, briefly, like a marionette. In the pale light coming through the blinds, his face is white, lips pressed together and bloodless.

Severus blinks.

Potter scrambles off him, shoving Severus back into the mattress when he pushes himself upright. He stands for a moment by the bed, eyes sweeping the room as if looking for something to hurl, then stalks to the bathroom and slams the door loudly behind him.

Severus levers himself up onto one elbow. He feels as if he’s been packed into his skull with a thick layer of wool. The clock by his bed reads 5:06 AM.

The bathroom door slams open again, rattling off the wall. “The Draught of Living Death,” says Potter flatly, stopping at the foot of Severus’s bed. He’s still shaking. “The _Draught of Living Death?_ ”

“You shouldn’t have tried to wake me.” Severus’s voice comes out hoarse.

“What,” snaps Potter, “and let you just — is this some kind of _game_ to you? Or did you actually mean to kill yourself? Get Harry Potter in a room and then just — fucking —”

Severus grasps at the straws of his composure, and draws himself into a sneer. “As always,” he snaps, “you are convinced the world revolves around you. Idiot boy, did you not think _me_ capable of measuring the correct dose of a simple sleeping potion?”

Potter stares at him, chest still rapidly rising and falling. The ends of his hair are damp spikes, and there are droplets speckling the front his gray T-shirt, as if he’s just sloppily splashed water across his face. “It’s not,” he says, “a simple sleeping potion.”

The anger abandons Severus as quickly as it came. He drops his gaze. “I’d have woken at 6,” he says. Then, more quietly still: “I won’t use it again.”

Potter looks startled, wrong-footed, but at least he’s stopped shaking. “Good,” he says, after a moment.

This newest silence is an awkward one, but it’s not furious anymore. Potter looks down at the floor, rubbing the back of his neck, and Severus thinks he’s gone a little pink. “I’ll, um,” he says. “Mind if I take the shower?”

Severus has never seen the point of bathing twice in one night, but then, he’s also always been mocked for his greasy hair. He shakes his head.

“Okay. Um. Thanks,” says Potter, and it comes out almost shy. This time, he closes the bathroom door quietly behind him.

Severus groans, and levers himself out of bed. Waking up from the Draught isn’t easy at the best of times, never mind an hour ahead of schedule. It’s also the only sleeping potion that works on him anymore.

But he doesn’t need it often. The small bottle in his bag has kept him going for more than a year, and it’s not even half empty. He won’t mind keeping his promise.

He could get rid of it here and now. Wait until Potter’s out of the bathroom, then pour it down the drain. He could always make more, of course, but that will take planning, a trip to the wizarding world for supplies.

He barely ever uses it now, anyway. Last night was an exception to so many rules.

The bottle is small in his hand, shining in the pale morning light.

Severus wraps it in a sock and returns it to the deepest recesses of his bag. He’ll keep his promise. He won’t use it again, for as long as Potter is here.

\---

_The hell am I doing_ , Severus wonders, right hand tight on the wheel.

He always feels a little — unmoored, when he finishes a job. Never quite sure how to find the next one, or if he really wants there to _be_ a next one. They always seem to find him anyway.

What are the alternatives, though? Return to England? Put down roots in some nameless American town? Both are equally unimaginable.

(The towns have names. Severus knows this.)

So he just — hits the road. Until, in Potter’s words, he finds his next thing. It’s always an odd, dreamlike time, one that makes him feel like he’s threading a narrow path through a tilting maze. Look too far forward or back, and he’ll lose his balance entirely.

Only now — now Potter is here. That alone should upend it all, destroy the fragile equilibrium Severus has built inside his soul. Somehow, it doesn’t. Maybe these between-times are so unreal it doesn’t matter. Maybe Potter’s been with him all along.

They don’t talk much until noon, when they stop and buy fried chicken from a black woman at a gas station. Then Severus drives them out through the cotton fields and parks on a gravel shoulder by the levee, and they climb on top of it to eat. The chicken’s still hot enough to burn their fingers.

“That’s the Mississippi River,” Severus says. Potter is sucking on one of his offended digits. “See, through the trees?”

Potter squints through the foliage for a moment, then back at Severus. “All I see is trees,” he says.

Severus rolls his eyes, and fights an inexplicable urge to smile. “Look again,” he reprimands Potter. “It’s muddy, and immense. It’s the central artery of an entire continent. See, there’s a barge going by.”

Potter, to his credit, looks — then laughs, and shakes his head. “You were always a terrible teacher,” he says, but he’s smiling, and his eyes find Severus’s again, and linger there.

“And you,” Severus sniffs, schooling his face into noble disdain, “were always an imbecile. Utterly lost to subtlety. Very well. We shall find you the Mississippi River.”

\---

They drive north to find a bridge that has an overlook for cars to stop. It’s out of their way — not that they had any way in mind — and Severus makes turn after turn through endless cotton fields, keeping the levee on their left. They drive down narrow lanes between cinderblock houses, slowing to a crawl for the children on bicycles. They don’t see a white man once.

At last, a highway emerges incongruous from the floodplain, and Severus accelerates onto the ramp only to brake again swiftly for the parking area on the right. There are families stopped too, laughing and chatting and peering through the clumsy mounted binoculars, their words snatched away by the noise of the traffic. Potter leans hard on the rail, hooking it under his arms and bending his knee until he can nearly rest his chin on it. From here, they’re looking upriver, and it’s busy with boats. An island across the channel is only the halfway stop of the thrumming bridge.

“We had a rash of murder-suicides,” Potter says, so quiet that Severus almost doesn’t hear.

He doesn’t speak, but he does draw closer, a silent invitation he thinks Potter will understand.

“Death Eaters’ families. Or sympathizers. We weren’t always sure, even after everything. They’d dose their children, then drink the Draught themselves.”

Behind them on the highway, a semi blasts its horn. Several pigeons take off in alarm, then circle back to their roost beneath the bridge.

“We could revive the adults, a lot of the time. If we got there fast enough. The kids were smaller, though. The poison acted faster. We’d lose them, every time. And send their parents to Azkaban, for — for believing their children were better off dead than raised to see Muggle-borns as equals.”

He lets out a barking laugh, scraped raw and ugly from his chest, and he has never reminded Severus more of Sirius Black.

“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, because that’s all there is to say.

“All this,” says Potter, standing suddenly upright with a sharp, expansive gesture around them. “It doesn’t make you angry? It doesn’t — that the white kids are up here taking pictures, and the black ones are down there on the fields where their great-great-grandfathers were slaves?”

Severus studies his own hands on the railing. Long fingers, hard knuckles. “It makes me angry,” he says.

It’s a confession. It’s the most honesty he’s bared to anyone, in years. Maybe in his life.

Potter punches the rail, suddenly. It rings like a muted gong, and vibrates in Severus’s grip. Potter’s hand must be stinging, but he gives no sign. “And I just,” he says, “I just — when there was Voldemort, I had someone to kill, you know? I had a — a source of all this evil. Only then he was gone, and the evil just keeps going, and — there’s no one to kill anymore.”

Boyd’s voice, Boyd’s eyes, Boyd’s hands. Severus’s throat closes tight. He stares down the far shore, willing it not to blur.

Potter must be expecting him to say something. He’ll be disappointed.

A minute passes, maybe more. Then Potter draws himself up, and shoots Severus a look laced with all the venom of hurt. “I’m sorry,” he says coldly. “I’m being a child, no doubt. We should go.”

It stings, but no more than it should. Mechanically, Severus leads the way back to the car.

In all his years of exile, he’s never felt this alone.

\---

He promised Potter he wouldn’t take the potion again, so he chain-smokes his way through the night.

Potter comes outside after his shower and stands awkward and barefoot on the still-warm cement. He looks for a moment like he’s thinking of joining Severus on the bench, but Severus has parked himself precisely at its center, one arm stretched out along the back, claiming. Excluding. He doesn’t look at Potter.

“Would you — like the shower?” Potter asks.

Severus takes another draw of his cigarette, and exhales delicately. “I would not,” he says.

“Are you all right?” Potter probes. Severus can imagine his worried frown. He refuses to look.

“Perfectly,” he says, and his tone is flawless ice.

“I’ll,” Potter tries. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

Severus doesn’t dignify that with a response.

\---

He considers leaving in the night. He almost does. It wasn’t the plan, when he first installed himself on this bench, but his exchange with Potter has performed some strange alchemy on his misery, transformed it into fury. He flicks his cigarette ashes onto the damp footprints Potter left on the sidewalk, watching them dry and disappear. On the road, a Jeep full of teenagers flies by, blasting country music and shouting along, and Severus briefly imagines killing them all.

The fury isn’t new, and it’s not _at_ Potter, exactly, though it encompasses him. It’s just the native weather of his soul, howling wind and lightning, and he can no more tame it than a sea can tame a storm. He can only be driven before it, or wait for it to blow itself out.

It’s the latter that wins out, in the end. By the time light begins to creep over the motel parking lot once more, all emotion has surrendered to a blissful, bone-deep exhaustion.

Potter looks almost as surprised as Severus to find that he’s still there. “Do you — want the shower?” he asks mechanically, still awkward, then breaks into incredulous, self-conscious laughter that’s so warm it almost seeps through Severus’s shell. “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot,” he says.

_I’ve been saying it for years,_ Severus thinks, but he can’t quite get his mouth to form the words.

He doesn’t shower, just takes the wheel again, but after half an hour on the road, Potter says, “All right. You haven’t slept, and you smell like an ashtray. Pull over. I’m driving,” and Severus is too tired to protest.

“I fail to see how smelling like an ashtray has anything to do with it,” he declares, out of principle, but he slides readily from his seat and circles the car to the passenger side, brushing elbows with Potter on the way. Potter adjusts the seat, turns the key in the ignition, and eases back into traffic.

Distantly, he thinks he should pay attention, make sure Potter actually knows how to drive a car — and one that won’t make any obstacles magically jump out of its way. The boy was raised by Muggles, yes, but he hardly would have learned to drive at age eleven, and Severus may despise Potter as a matter of principle, but it hasn’t escaped his notice that the boy’s upbringing was anything but a coddled one — if he’s learned to drive like a proper Muggle, it won’t have been from his own family, and if he hasn’t...

Severus is asleep before they hit third gear.

\---

When he wakes up, they’re in Kansas. He can tell by the Kansas State Trooper pulling them over to the side of the freeway.

“What did you do?” he demands, cold clenching in his gut. He’s been lazy — should have ditched the car days ago — and if it’s been reported stolen, then —

“Nothing!” Potter hisses, looking almost as panicked as Severus feels. “I was going the speed limit, I don’t know what —”

They’re both interrupted by a tapping on the driver’s side window. Potter spares Severus a sickened glance, then rolls it down.

“License and registration, please.” The cop’s voice is impassive, and for a moment Severus thinks that Potter won’t have a license, but he does, hands it over calmly, and Severus fumbles through the glovebox for the paperwork. The cop gives them a brief nod and returns to his car.

The wait is interminable. They don’t speak, just stare in angry frustration out of their respective windows. Time crawls on, and on.

Severus is starting to wonder if the cop has had a heart attack or something, is just lying immobile in his car while they wait ludicrously for his return, when he hears the sirens. Across the highway, cars in the oncoming lanes are pulling over for a whole police convoy, tearing down the interstate with lights blazing. They pass; then, one after another, brake to veer across the median and surge back onto the westbound lanes.

And then the station wagon is surrounded. Boxed in by flashing lights on all sides, and men with guns are leaping out of the cars, and an amplified voice is commanding them, _Get out of the car, and put your hands on your head! Lie down on the ground! Keep your hands on your head!_

Severus has the time to catch one shocked look from Potter, only one, before there’s a knee in his back and handcuffs snapping round his wrists and a voice saying, “Severus Snape, you are under arrest for arson, triple homicide, and grand theft auto. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…”

\---

He doesn’t see Potter for a while after that.

They’re loaded into separate cars, cop’s hand on his head so he won’t hit it on the way in, a disconcertingly intimate gesture. _Got ‘em on a busted tail light_ , he hears someone saying. _Total fluke. Jim nearly shit his pants when Sheila got the plates back._

They roar back to the station at over 100, lights and sirens wailing. It strikes Severus as a bit unnecessary, but who is he to complain? Then he’s in an interview room, handcuffed to a table opposite a wide one-way mirror, and exercising his right to silence as one uniform after another slides into the seat across from him and leaves again. One of them is a public defender — a change of pace. Severus doesn’t speak to him, either.

It’s not strategy, though perhaps it could be. It’s more that he’s just so — damn — _tired_ , and can’t see the harm in sitting there until they let him sleep and formulate a longer-term plan. He’s been here before, and he’s always found a way out. After all, he’s not a fucking amateur.

( _You let yourself get caught,_ a tiny voice in his mind whispers nastily. _Doesn’t seem very professional to me._ )

Severus ignores it. He’ll find a way out once he’s slept. Undoubtedly they’ll have released Potter already; he knows nothing about any of this. Better that way. He won’t stick around, not after this particular revelation. Give Potter time to get well away, and then Severus will get out. Get his life back to normal.

_Normal_. God. _Thank God_ , he insists to himself.

He could always use his trump card. But he won’t.

\---

Eventually, even cops give up for the day, and they store him in a small holding cell with a hard bench of a bed. He stretches out gratefully, folds his hands across his chest, and closes his eyes.

He’s startled upright almost immediately by an ear-splitting bang.

The light above his bed has exploded into sparks, and alarms begin to wail as the room plunges into darkness. Then, with a terrible screeching of metal, the cell door bends, bulges, and flies open.

“Snape!” And it’s Potter, of course it’s Potter, wild and impetuous and beyond idiocy, skidding into the cell. “Are you all right, did they —”

“HANDS IN THE AIR!” roars an unseen voice, and suddenly, Severus can’t say from where, there are red lights skittering across the walls of the room, seeking, then converging, as if magnetically drawn, in a firefly dance on his chest.

“ _NO!_ ” yells Potter, and he steps sharply forward, toward the invisible marksmen, into their sights. There’s a startled shout — and the unmistakable report, which Severus almost feels before he hears, of the pull of a trigger.

He doesn’t think. The spell leaves his fingertips like lightning, and his accompanying shout is unnecessary, belated: “ _PROTEGO!_ ” It comes out hoarse and resounding, high as a hawk’s scream, and the bullet falls harmless to the floor, an inch from Potter’s heart.

There’s chaos then, more shots and shouting and flashlight beams flying across the walls, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need to speak the spells; they flow out of him easily, so long untapped, and one by one, their assailants fall unconscious to the floor. It seems like an eternity, but is probably less than a minute, and then the air is quiet.

Potter turns to him, pale in the dull emergency lighting that’s now overtaken the corridor. “You —”

“Hush,” Severus snaps. “We have larger problems.”

Potter opens his mouth again, but is cut off by a familiar, resounding crack — one Severus would be perfectly happy to never hear again. Then there’s another, and a flurry more, and when a voice shouts, “Drop your wands, and put your hands in the air!”, neither of them hesitates to comply.

\---

It takes some time for the American Aurors to really believe they don’t have wands. They both get searched thoroughly, with charms and an old-fashioned patdown, while a chubby-cheeked young Auror in immaculately pressed robes mutters, “But I don’t — how could they —?” The rest of the team is obliviating efficiently, piling up unconscious policemen against the far wall, and then a team is sent to wipe the Muggle records while another repairs the physical damage to the station. The overhead lights flick belatedly back on, illuminating the scene in full for the first time as a grizzled older Auror makes his way over to the two of them and their minder.

“Anything?” he snaps, brusque.

“I don’t —” Chubby Cheeks starts, and then stops abruptly, eyes scanning back over Severus and Potter. “Hang on,” he says.

There’s a loud bang as Severus’s cell door returns to its proper shape. The older Auror glances over his shoulder at it. “What?” he demands, still looking away.

“You’re — I don’t believe it,” says Chubby Cheeks. “You’re _Harry Potter._ ”

That, at last, gets his superior’s attention. He turns back around fully, spares Severus only half a glance, then surveys Potter comprehensively. “Well?” he says. “Are you?”

“Er,” says Potter, looking sheepish. “Er, yes.”

\---

It’s absurd, after that, how easy it all is.

The Aurors don’t ask what happened, or how they wound up in a wandless firefight with a dozen state troopers. They don’t ask who Severus is. They don’t ask why they got arrested. Just assure Potter that he and his friend have been cleared from all No-Maj databases, up to and including their car, and that they’re all terribly sorry for the misunderstanding, and hope Potter enjoys his time in America.

Within an hour, they’re back in the station wagon as if nothing’s ever happened, and Severus is blindingly — breathtakingly — furious.

Potter’s not pleased either, drives them in silence with a clenched jaw to the nearest motel, and Severus figures he’ll probably just drop him there and disappear. There’s no way they’re continuing this ridiculous experiment after tonight; Potter just didn’t want to make waves when the American Aurors returned “his” car. But Potter walks into the motel lobby, pays for a room in stony silence, and it’s not until he’s grabbing both their bags from the trunk that Severus demands, in a voice that comes out hoarse, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Potter drops the bags as if he’s been waiting for this, wheels to face Severus, and his nostrils flare with anger. “What am I doing,” he repeats. “What am _I_ doing? _Triple homicide_ , Snape? Maybe you should tell me what _you’re_ doing?”

Severus sees white. The next thing he knows, he’s striding into Potter’s space, prodding his chest, and if he had a wand, it would be pressed to Potter’s throat. “That,” he snarls, “is _none of your fucking business_.”

“It’s my business when I have to _break you out of jail!_ ” Potter all but shouts, and they’re still outside, someone’s going to hear, but just now Severus doesn’t care.

“You are,” he breathes, and he knows his face has gone livid, “so _intolerably_ self-centered, arrogant, convinced of your own —”

“Oh, _please_ ,” Potter spits, and his voice is laced with scorn. “This again? Really? Any time I put you on the back foot, you have to go and call me a child? It’s wearing pretty fucking thin when I’m cleaning up _your_ messes, _Severus_.” He speaks Severus’s first name like poison, like it’s filth on his lips, dropping ugly and unwanted to the ground between them.

“You call that _cleaning up_ ?” he demands. “Bringing fucking _MACUSA_ down on our heads? Charging in with no wand, no plan, just blowing things up like an utterly unschooled _child_?”

“So you’d rather be rotting in that cell,” Potter spits, “than accepting help from _Harry fucking Potter_ , from the one person you always hated more than —”

And that’s it, it’s the last thing, it’s all that Severus can take. “ _WHY ARE YOU HERE?_ ” he roars, and he’s distantly aware that flecks of his spit have flown into Potter’s face, but he doesn’t care. “I never asked for this! I don’t want you here! Why don’t you just fucking _leave?_ ”

Potter doesn’t flinch away, doesn’t shout, but his eyes are still sparking dangerously. There’s a fleck of moisture high on his right cheekbone, glinting under the streetlights. “It’s your car,” he breathes, deadly in the quiet. “Why don’t you?”

And in an instant, all of Severus’s helpless fury, all of his desperate, aimless hatred, crystallizes. And it’s like it’s a track, one he’s barreling down full tilt, and he seizes Potter’s chin in one hand, and yanks him forward, and kisses him.

He means it to be angry, and it is.

He also means it to _end this_ . To make Potter jump back in shock, scrub at his mouth and look down at Severus with unconcealed disgust, to make him storm off into the night and leave Severus, let him go back to _his life_ , which may be lonely and desperate and hard-edged but at least is _his_. He means it to put Potter in his place. To deal with him, once and for all.

Only, that’s not what happens.

What happens is this: Potter makes a sound into his mouth, some incoherent mix of shock and anger and — and something else, and then Potter’s hand is fisted in his shirt and the other is cupping the back of Severus’s head and Potter is kissing him, kissing him like he’s the only thing in the world.

They stumble in through the motel room door, Potter steering, bumping them into doorframes and nightstands, Potter with his teeth worrying at Severus’s jaw and his hands worrying at Severus’s belt, Potter pressing insistent hips into Severus’s own so there’s no mistake of _exactly_ where this is going.

And Severus — yes, his mind is numb with shock, but it doesn’t take too long for him to catch up, not long before he’s flipping Potter onto his back and growling as he pins Potter’s hands above his head. There’s gasping and half-words and _do you —_ and _yes_ — and then Potter is naked and Severus is slipping slick fingers inside him and crooking them just so, and Potter is sweating and shaking and begging, words like _want_ and _please_ and _fuck me_ and _damn it, Severus, just_ —

So Severus does, and Potter nearly screams with it, takes shuddering breaths and cants his hips and spreads his legs still wider. Severus fucks him across the mattress, and releases his wrists to cup his skull in one hand, protect it from the headboard as the headboard bangs against the wall.

After, they roll off each other, sweaty and sticky and breathless. The top of the motel comforter is scratchy and uncomfortable, but it’s too hot to get under it, and the AC is already making ominous groans and clanks across the room. Severus should really clean up, and move to the other bed, but his brain is swamped by orgasm, and he hasn’t slept in two days, and despite the new distance between them, Potter’s hand is, inexplicably, still tangled in his hair.

Severus lets his hand rest where it falls — which seems to be on Potter’s hip, sticky with drying come — and surrenders himself to sleep.

\---

When he wakes up, they’re tangled closer, Potter’s arm a lead weight on his ribs and Potter’s breath stale and steady across his face. It should be disgusting. It is disgusting, and Severus is disgusting, and he extracts himself gently and goes to take a shower.

He takes a while, but when he emerges, Potter is still asleep. He pauses, undecided. It seems awkward to be fully dressed with Potter sprawled asleep on the bedspread, naked ass on full — and glorious — display. It seems equally awkward to sit around in a towel.

Undoubtedly, when Potter wakes up, he’ll be horrified. And that will be that, and Severus will have the quiet he’s been craving.

He’s just decided to get dressed and go out for coffee, find a way to burn some time, so that when he gets back Potter will be — well, gone, probably, but at the very least, awake and fully clothed — when Potter stirs, and opens his eyes.

Severus freezes. He feels ridiculous, not even wrapped in his towel, just clutching it in two hands, and Potter’s eyes find him instantly. He braces himself for the slow horror, the disgust, but it doesn’t come. Potter just smiles, warm and lopsided where his cheek is resting on his arm, and sits up, and, in a scratchy voice, says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Severus ventures in return, swallowing. His eyes can’t help straying to Potter’s cock, in full view now that he’s sitting upright. It is — not limp.

Potter rises, and Severus stands rooted to the spot as he approaches. Potter takes his chin — a mirror of Severus yesterday, but gentle, and draws him into a slow, languid kiss. Severus struggles to be offended by his morning breath, and fails.

And then Potter brushes past him and into the bathroom, leaving Severus grasping at his towel and the shreds of his sanity, thinking, _what — what the fuck, what the FUCK._

\---

“How’d you do it?” Potter asks.

They’re in the car again, a pair of black coffees in the cupholders between them, the remnants of a half dozen donuts in a crumpled paper bag. Severus feels oddly removed from himself. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Do what?” he asks, clenching his fist tighter on the wheel.

“Magic,” says Potter. The word comes so easy to him, like it means nothing. “Focused magic, I mean, without a wand.”

Severus blinks. In answer, he reaches to pull his hair up, behind his right ear, and reveal the hidden thread of white.

Potter stares for a moment, then comprehension dawns across his face. “Unicorn hair,” he says.

Severus nods, letting his hair fall back into place. “I did that years ago. During the war,” he explains. “Haven’t needed it much.”

Potter looks fascinated. “And it works like a wand?” he asks. “Just as well as one?”

“Not _just_ as well as one,” Severus explains. “It requires discipline, and focus. After all, most witches and wizards can perform some degree of uncontrolled wandless magic, when they feel desperate — like you did at the station. And other magical cultures don’t use wands the way we do — they have wholly different magical systems, that don’t rely on the use of a focus.”

He expects Potter to look away, glaze over with boredom, but he doesn’t. So Severus continues, explaining his own readings on those cultures, and the realization that to learn other systems of magic would be like learning to walk again — would require training as if from childhood. Instead, he applied some of the principles of West African magical systems to facilitating wandless magic in the European paradigm — active and transitive, reliant on a focus. With enough concentration, the focus needn’t be a wand.

“That’s how potions work,” he adds. “You think a Muggle could brew the Draught of Living Death, given the proper ingredients? No. It’s a focus. Just one that holds the magic indefinitely after the caster is done.”

Potter is watching him quietly. “You love it,” he says, and Severus startles.

“Magic, I mean,” Potter adds. “It’s obvious in the way you talk about it. I don’t know how I never noticed before.”

Severus’s mouth feels dry. He needs to say something, to put Potter off of the next question, before it’s too late.

“Why did you stop?” Potter asks, and there it is.

He could give a hundred answers. He could tell Potter he hasn’t, really, just doesn’t want to draw attention to himself here in the US. He could pretend that’s not half the reason he left Britain. That a clanging horror at his use of magic last night isn’t still rubbing against his ribs.

“I didn’t trust myself,” he says.

Potter watches him for a moment, then stretches, yawns, and resettles himself in his seat. “Me too, I guess,” he says, a little sleepily, and Severus glances over at him sharply.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and his voice comes out cold.

But Potter seems oblivious. “I mean — I don’t know. I’ve done so much — between Voldemort, and the rest of it — and people back home still look at me like I’m some, some kind of _savior_ , and I just — got tired of it, you know? I didn’t want to be the one always saving the day.”

Severus’s veins go hot, then cold. “Potter,” he grinds out. “I don’t mean that I _didn’t want the responsibility_ anymore. You think I love magic? _That is the fucking problem._ It’s how Dark wizards work, Potter. They love the power. They’ll cast the Killing Curse and feel it like a song in their blood. I’ve killed, and I’ve tortured, and even when I was on the so-called Right Side —” he spits out the words — “I still _loved it._ Do you understand me? Dark wizards are fucking addicts, Potter, and you should be a _lot more worried_ than you are about last night, and giving me my first fix in years.”

He only realizes after he says it how it sounds. He means being forced to use magic — of course that’s what he means — but he and Potter also — and he took control, was _aggressive_ , and Potter —

“You saved my life,” says Potter quietly.

“What?” snaps Severus, trying to collect his scattered thoughts.

“That’s why you did it. To save my life,” Potter repeats. “Remember? The bullet?”

Severus remembers.

A dozen different responses attempt and elude him. In the end, he says nothing at all, but Potter seems to accept that, merely curls up and dozes in the passenger seat until it’s time to stop for gas.

\---

Potter doesn’t wake when Severus pulls into the station, or while he’s filling the tank. So he leaves him there in the car, oddly reluctant to wake him, and goes inside to use the bathroom.

Once he’s relieved himself, he stands at the sink and stares at his reflection.

It makes no sense, the way Potter’s acting. Like he actually — _wants_ Severus.

Severus has no illusions about his own sex life. He despises himself, yes — always has — but then, he despises most of humanity, too, perhaps even more, and that simplifies matters. Never before has he thought himself unworthy of a sexual partner; never before has he expected — or feared — that they’ll immediately leave.

It makes no sense. He’s always detested Potter even more than the rest of humanity put together. He should be congratulating himself on a good fuck, and moving on.

But Potter is just — _there_. Weird and insistent and unfathomable, _completely infuriating_ and yet, this morning, that smile, and that kiss, did something unwelcome in the pit of Severus’s stomach, something he can’t undo.

The kiss is the problem. Without it, this makes perfect sense, a more-than-slightly-awkward one-night stand, maybe even one where they respect each other in the morning, but —

But this is different.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe Potter sensed his awkwardness this morning and kissed him to shut him up, to move them both smoothly past that most unfortunate segment of their respective mornings. Maybe it was nothing.

Maybe he should stop staring at his reflection in a gas station bathroom and mooning over Harry Potter like a thirteen-year-old.

He splashes water in his face and dries it hurriedly, then unlocks the door. He’s expecting a line, but it’s only one person outside: Potter, looking flushed and rumpled and oddly stubborn, and when Severus goes to move past him, he places a hand squarely on his chest, and shoves him back into the bathroom, following closely after.

That’s how Severus finds himself pressed against a bathroom door by Harry Potter, whose mouth is hot on his and who’s murmuring between kisses things like, “Had a dream about you — so _fucking_ hot — no idea — can’t stop thinking about last night —”

And then Potter is on his knees and unzipping Severus’s fly and taking him without preamble in his mouth, and Severus’s mind is spinning with confusion and ramifications, but he lets them go, lets himself run hands through Potter’s hair and ride Potter’s mouth while Potter moans inarticulate encouragement, until he comes with a cry that echoes off the tiled walls. He jerks Potter off afterward, fast and crude, but Potter practically melts against him, kissing Severus with a mouth that still tastes of his come, and Severus doesn’t mind it nearly as much as he might have assumed he would. He especially doesn’t mind when Potter’s kisses turn sloppy and syncopated, and when Potter stutters against him, and when Potter’s eyes fly open and lock on Severus as he comes.

\---

In the car that afternoon, Severus keeps catching Potter looking over at him and grinning, just grinning, with the pink high in his cheeks and something unnameable dancing in his eyes. At a certain point, Severus can’t help himself, and realizes he’s smiling, too.

The sex that night is deliberate and unhurried, and it takes Severus apart. Potter undresses him with a focus that makes Severus shiver under his gaze, and rides him at an excruciatingly slow pace, until they’re both trembling and cursing through rough-bitten lips and Potter finally, _finally_ yields, and sinks fast onto Severus’s cock with a groan. They finish together, at a furious pace, and Potter clenches around him when he comes, words streaming incoherent from his mouth: _oh god, oh god, you’re amazing, can’t believe I, you, fuck_ —

Any possible response is shambles in Severus’s brain. He at least cleans himself up this time, but Potter joins him in the shower, legs trembling beneath him and laugh shaky in Severus’s ear when Severus catches him. Then his mouth is roaming, apparently fascinated by the play of hot water on Severus’s skin, and Severus groans and pulls him back upright and manhandles them both through soaping and rinsing. He turns the water off and wraps a towel firmly around Potter’s shoulders, then huffs a sigh when Potter merely blinks at him, and steps in, once again, to help.

Back in the room, he hesitates for a moment between the two beds, even as Potter sinks happily into the unsoiled one. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Potter mumbles into the pillow, and Severus grins, just a little, and joins him.

Potter promptly turns over and wraps himself around Severus’s back, pulling Severus close with one arm until their hips fit snugly together. He mumbles something wordless, and kisses the back of Severus’s neck, and they are both asleep before Severus can think to protest.

\---

The rhythm they sink into is a strange one. Across Colorado, and into Utah, blue peaks and aspen hillsides giving way to dusty mesas that blaze in the sunset. The station wagon’s air conditioning gives up for good just before Fruita. They drive a hundred miles with the windows down and the desert wind snatching the words from their mouths, then turn north at Green River, bound for cooler weather.

There’s so much left unsaid. Severus can feel it like a distant storm, charging the sky around them but waiting, just beyond the horizon, to strike. Their half-finished argument lies where they left it, and all the orphaned questions alongside it. _Triple homicide? Why are you here? Why don’t you leave? Why don’t you?_

It can’t possibly last. This ridiculous teenager-giddiness, this erasure of all problems by a body and another body combined. And yet whenever Severus tries to hold this thing at arm’s length, to look at it properly, instead what meets his fingers is warm skin and willing hands, a mouth that curves up so much more now, green eyes that are starting to laugh.

“Is it weird,” says Potter, that night in Orem, “to be fucking a man who was in love with your mother?”

He’s not looking at Severus, just gazing past his bare shoulder at the window blinds, or some point beyond. He says it casually, but his words fly like an unexpected blow, and Severus flinches.

His defenses are already rising around him. The cool disdain, the shuttering. Only —

He stops.

For days now, he’s had two Potters riding around in his car with him, making his vision double and his head swim whenever he tries to glimpse both at once. And now, suddenly, as if someone has turned a lens into focus, they resolve, sharp and clear.

The barb wasn’t aimed at him, but at Potter himself.

Severus has almost forgotten this. What it’s like to have something to give — something of yourself, freely offered, that leaves you no less whole for the giving.

“It wasn’t like that,” he says.

Potter doesn’t move, doesn’t answer. But his eyes slide up to Severus’s face — and away again, but not far.

“Lily,” says Severus, “was the best person I have ever known, and one of few I have truly loved. But it wasn’t like that.”

Potter doesn’t look up again, just gazes fiercely at the base of Severus’s throat. Something in his face shifts, crumples, holds. “What was it like?” he asks, in a voice that cracks.

So Severus tells him, in words, what he once could only in pictures. Of an unwanted childhood, and a quenchless thirst for grandeur — for magic, high ceilings, vault behind vault of dazzling mystery, the regard of important men. Of a red-headed girl to whom he could offer the world, and who looked at him like he already mattered. Of a life that, once realized, turned bitter in his mouth, and always took more than it gave. Of his own foolishness, and seduction by power — his utter belief in his choices, until they came crashing down on the woman he loved, long since embittered against him.

“I told you I don’t trust myself,” he says quietly. “Do you see now? The things I’ve wanted, the choices I’ve made — they’ve never been the right ones, and I’ve never seen that until it’s too late. Ambition always blinded me to truth.”

“Except with my mom,” Potter murmurs. His head has sagged, as Severus spoke, and now rests against arm, one eye half hidden by the pillow.

“Except with Lily.” Severus gazes up at the ceiling. “She — I thought for a long time I was in love with her. I wanted her, certainly, in the way a man wants what he cannot have. But all that was later. After I’d already made too many mistakes. Before that, she was simply my first — and maybe my only — true friend.”

_And my lodestone_ , he wants to say. _My north star. The one — the only thing I can trust. My own soul is far too faulty to guide me._

Only none of that is fair to Lily. She was human, far too flawed and complicated and messy and wonderful to reduce to a single light of truth and goodness. If she were here, she’d scold him for his ridiculous notions. After she’d finished reacting — God, how would she react? — to seeing him naked in bed with her son.

He can see her face now, a deeper red even than her hair. For a moment, the joy and pain of the thought crushes his lungs in his chest.

“I’ll be your friend,” Potter mutters indistinctly, more than half gone into sleep. Severus smiles at the absurdity of it all, and turns to rest his chin in Potter’s hair.

\---

They’re shy of each other, the next morning — shyer by far than they’ve been of each other’s bodies. The broken AC makes it easy to pass a day with few words. It’s still far too hot to drive with the windows up, and so their few exchanges are shouted and logistical.

Severus occupies himself planning the evening. Potter still looks fragile today, his smiles jagged and translucent. Once they’ve stopped for the night, in the privacy of a motel room, Severus plans to wipe that mask away. To worship every inch of Potter’s body twice over, with his hands and with his lips, until Potter can’t help but feel seen, known, loved.

The word arrives unheralded in his thoughts. Severus skirts politely around it, not meeting its eyes.

Dinner is in Idaho, at a diner with peeling linoleum floors and all-day breakfast. Potter orders blueberry pancakes, and Severus can’t fight a smile. Potter grins back, sharing the joke, but his gaze wanders out the window, looking toward distant mountains. Severus applies himself to his burger.

It’s a messy one — the kind you eat close to the plate — and it’s when he’s bent low over the table, negotiating a haphazard mouthful, that he sees it.

The booth behind Potter is occupied, too. The guy with his back to them has a baseball cap on over his shaved head. And that means nothing, it’s nothing, just a balding guy who shaved his head to spare the shame, except —

His right boot is jutting out, just a little, into the aisle. It’s black. The laces are white, and they don’t cross on their way up the front, but climb in horizontal ladder-steps, one after the other.

“Hey,” says Potter.

Severus looks up. His eyes feel strangely out of focus. His brain feels out of focus, too.

“Hey,” says Potter again, and Severus realizes he’s reached out to wrap concerned fingers around his elbow. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” says Severus. “Yeah. Fine.”

\---

It doesn’t change anything. Not really. One last night, and he’ll steal away while Potter is sleeping, leave him a note to take the car. It’s better this way. They’re starting to run out of continent, just a state or two from the Pacific, and what then? This was never meant to be a lasting arrangement. This way, they’ll avoid the awkward goodbyes.

It’ll take him some time to get settled. Drift into town like the kind of newcomer that might as well have been there all along. Find a job, work his way round to the right circles. Maybe he’ll lose the accent, and the name; it’s easier to keep them, but it’s also a gamble. It worked on Boyd. But then, Boyd liked interesting things.

He’ll have to lie low for a while. Just in case Potter gets some ridiculous idea and doesn’t clear out immediately.

He’s glad he didn’t throw away the Draught.

He presses every touch into Potter’s skin that night, as if he could leave them to linger after he’s gone. When Potter gets free of his shirt, he begins to move toward the bed, but Severus catches him gently by the wrist. He doesn’t want to hurry this. His mouth and hands want rein to roam, to show Potter — if this is his last chance — just how beautiful he is.

He pivots Potter by the hips to face the mirror on the wall, and presses his chest to Potter’s back. In the mirror, Potter’s lips are parted, cheeks flushed, and he gasps when Severus turns his head to tongue lightly along the shell of his ear. He splays one hand over Potter’s flat stomach, drawing him close, and lets the other wander up to Potter’s nipple as he trails kisses down his neck.

Potter gasps again and writhes back against him, and Severus is helplessly hard, pressed tight against Potter’s ass. He thrusts against the friction before he can stop himself, but it’s all wrong, too fast, he wants to make this last, and Potter’s not helping, he’s grinding back again. If he keeps doing this, too soon it will be over, all over, and he can’t, he can’t, they have to slow it down. He buries his face in Potter’s neck and wraps him tight in both arms and wills him to stay still, wills his own chest to stop shaking, wills it all to go like he planned.

Only Potter hasn’t gotten that message, not at all. Potter is twisting, breaking his hold, and then he’s taking Severus by the shoulders, by the cheeks, saying, “What’s wrong? Severus, what’s wrong?”

It’s only when Potter thumbs a tear from his cheek that Severus realizes he’s crying.

Potter guides him to the bed and sinks down with him, wrapping him up in octopus arms and legs, and still Severus can’t speak. He just keeps crying and shaking with it, Potter wrapped close around him, until he feels a damp spot on his shoulder and looks down to realize Potter’s crying, too.

That calms him, improbably, somehow, to the point where he can gasp out, “I’m sorry.”

Potter doesn’t look up, just tightens his hold. “This has something to do with that guy in the diner,” he says, “doesn’t it.”

Severus forces a reluctant nod. “I have to leave,” he says, and his voice is hoarse and cracked.

“Why?” asks Potter. “Do you know him?”

“You said,” Severus starts, and the words get caught, thick, on the tears in his throat. He coughs, and tries again. “You said until I find my next thing. It’s my next thing.”

“Do you know him?” Potter repeats.

“No.” But he knows those boots.

“Then —”

“He’s a skinhead. A neo-Nazi,” Severus says quietly.

“And —” Potter cuts himself off abruptly. When he speaks again, it’s much quieter. “That’s what you do. That’s why — you find the evil people, and you stop them.”

Beyond a helpless jerk of a nod, Severus can’t speak.

“How do you know they’re evil? Not just — assholes who want to look bigger than they are?”

Severus swallows. “I get to know them,” he says softly. “Get close.”

He feels Potter stiffen against him.

“Not this close,” he admits.

After a moment, Potter’s limbs ease again, just a little. “The person you lost,” he says.

“I killed him.”

“Did he deserve it?”

Severus closes his eyes. “I have to tell myself he did. Yes.”

“Why you?”

His eyes fly open again. “What?”

“Why you?” Potter presses. “Why not let the police handle it? They handled us.”

Severus opens his mouth, closes it again. To say it aloud sounds so stupid. “To atone,” he says. “To know what to do with myself. To know I made some difference in the world.”

“Don’t.” Potter lifts his head to look down at him, and his face is wet, but his mouth is firm, eyes clear and intent. “You’ve done your part. More than.”

Severus laughs. “Easy for the savior of the world to say.”

“I wouldn’t have saved jackshit without your help, and you know it.”

He can’t help a smile at that. But he also can’t listen to Potter — he can’t possibly. This is all he has, all he knows how to do. If he were to stop — where would he go? What would he do? Go back to the wizarding world? Drive aimlessly around America forever?

“Please,” says Potter. “Don’t go.”

And Severus knows he won’t.

\---

It takes another week to reach the coast.

They’re moving slower now, wandering more aimlessly. Twice now, Potter has sent them on wild goose chases up mountain roads, in search of cool weather and clear stars, and they’ve had to back their way out when the road deteriorated into a boulder-filled gully. They’ve slept under the stars on a sagebrush plain in eastern Oregon, Severus muttering under his breath about scorpions and Potter laughing in delighted mockery, and watched the Milky Way wheel overhead. They wind their way north, and then westward still, stopping where an immense waterfall thunders over cliffs of basalt, and again when they reach more mountains, to climb past a peak so immense and snow-capped that, from a distance, Potter thought it had to be a cloud.

The Pacific, when they reach it, is unimpressive in comparison: a muddy river mouth fringed by fading industry, which opens, gradually, onto an endless, formless double sky. _Come as you are,_ says the sign when they roll into town.

They don’t stop, just keep driving straight to the shore; it seems the thing to do. They pass a Mexican restaurant on the way; maybe they’ll stop there for lunch, Severus thinks, once they’re done with — whatever they’re doing here.

The parking lot for the beach is just a few cars wide, unpaved. Severus follows Potter through a line of boulders streaked white with bird shit. Dried seaweed and driftwood crunch between the stones under his feet. Before them, though, a vast tide flat stretches its arms wide, shining brilliant in the sun. The morning’s last sluggish fog is just burning away. Out beyond it, sea stacks loom like enchanted castles. Past them, thousands of miles of ocean.

“Want to keep going?” Potter calls over his shoulder. His voice is almost lost in the cacophony of gulls swirling above them. Somewhere off to the north, sea lions are barking.

Severus arches an eyebrow, even though Potter isn’t looking. “In what boat?”

Potter turns to face him, then.

His hair has grown too long, and the wind whips it back into his eyes, forcing him to squint. The air smells of fish and rotting seaweed. Eternity flashes on the horizon. Potter grins, and it lights up the sky.

“We’re wizards, remember?” he says.


End file.
